Godfrey Reggio is best known for the first installment of his avant-garde “Qatsi” trilogy, Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance. The 1982 film was a Philip Glass-scored non-linear experiment in slow motion and timelapse footage, depicting urban and natural scenes throughout the US. Koyaanisqatsi contains no dialogue at all, and its follow-ups, Powaqqatsi: Life in transformation (1988) and Naqoyqatsi: Life as war (2002), contain very little—all three films are named for words in Hopi, as Reggio believed “language is in a state of vast humiliation,” saying, “It no longer describes the world in which we live.”

Before all of this however, Reggio was a community activist working on issues of health care and gang violence in New Mexico, eventually forming a sort of media activist non-profit, the Institute for Regional Education. The IRE was commissioned by the The New Mexico Civil Liberties Union to create a public service announcement warning of the growing surveillance culture, resulting in the trippy, insidious short you see below. In addition to cinematographer Ron Fricke‘s trademark visual style, the PSA parallels Reggio’s later work pretty clearly in terms of theme. There is a palpable fear of an unfeeling, authoritarian modernity, a historical period of technology and industrialization, rather than humanity.

While the campaign ran on billboards, radio and in print ads, it was the television commercial that really caught on—viewers actually called stations to see when the ad would air again. Despite the success of the campaign, the ACLU stopped funding the IRE, and after an unsuccessful Washington fundraiser, Fricke suggested the remaining money be used to fund a full-length film—Koyaanisqatsi.

If you’re in the UK or planning to head over to London this year, then it might be worth a visit to the city’s esteemed Victoria and Albert Museum where there is an exhibition of Disobedient Objects charting the history of protest through the “objects of art and design from activist social movement over the last 30 years.”

From Suffragette teapots to protest robots, this exhibition will be the first to examine the powerful role of objects in movements for social change. It will demonstrate how political activism drives a wealth of design ingenuity and collective creativity that defy standard definitions of art and design.

Disobedient objects are often everyday items that have been turned to a new purpose. But social change is about making as much as breaking. Sometimes designing a new object creates a new way to disobey.

The exhibition covers anti-globalization demonstrations, the Occupy movement, plus a wide array materials from Unions, activists and protestors down the year. Amongst the items on display are a robot that paints graffiti, union strike banners, placards, fake money and Occupy George stamps.

The V&A have also made available activist posters with instructions on how to make improvised tear gas masks and bucket pamphlet bombs.

How to Guide – Makeshift Tear-Gas Mask
Handmade gas masks were an essential response to police actions during the 2013 mass protests in Istanbul. These events saw the Turkish government release a record amount of tear gas to disperse demonstrators. Protesters devised a way to protect themselves with basic materials like plastic bottles, elastic, and strips of insulation foam.

Since 2013, the idea spread and handmade gas masks have appeared on protestors as far away as Caracas, Venezuela.

How to Guide – Bucket Pamphlet Bomb
This bucket-type leaflet bomb used by the London Recruits, a group of mostly young non-South Africans working voluntarily for the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP). With these devices, the London Recruits distributed censored information in South African cities from 1969 onwards. The leaflet bombs harmed no one, but distributed hundreds of leaflets high into the air.

This how-to is based on sketch by Ken Keable, one of the Recruits, and is based on the research in his book The London Recruits. These devices were developed by ANC exiles in Britain, who tested prototypes in Bristol, the Somerset countryside, on Hampstead Heath and in Richmond Park.

A couple of weeks ago the “men’s rights” website A Voice for Men put up a post calling attention to a “commemorative coin” celebrating the First International Conference on Men’s Issues. The coin was designed by Peter Vinczer, the son of men’s rights activist Attila Vinczer; it contains 1 ounce of .999 fine silver and costs $58.88.

“Joe from Lowell” is one of several commenters who have probably cracked the case: “They’re throwing one little stone of masculine rationality into the ocean that is a male-persecuting society, but that one little stone will send out ripples, you betcha.” This makes sense, because the inscription on the other side of the coin, from Robert F. Kennedy, reads as follows: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

The text underneath the picture reads, “MHRA 2008-2014”—searching on “MHRA” yields extremely little on the Internet. It seems that “men rights association” or men’s rights activism” etc. are the most common phrases, but some in the movement have shifted to “men’s human rights” because it sounds less douche-y or something. In reality it just sounds confused, of course.

I’m not real sure what this video is (I certainly didn’t watch it—it’s nearly two hours long) but the coin image is at the very start, so maybe it has something to do with it.

Who would have thought you could make music from speeches by George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld? Well, this is exactly what minimalist composer Graham Fitkin and percussionist Joby Burgess did in 2008 with their number “Chain of Command.”

Fitkin wrote “Chain of Command” which uses samples taken from speeches by Dubya and Rumsfeld about Guantanamo Bay, the Iraq War and the inquiry into prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. These extracts were then carefully edited, manipulated and slowly rebuilt to create a “confrontational and direct work, which examines the use of constantly looped, loud music, 24 hours a day, as torture at Guantanamo.”

Performed by Burgess on his xylosynth (“a hybrid instrument somewhere between a xylophone and a synthesiser”) “Chain of Command” is a powerful piece of political music.

Torture a man and he’ll tell you what you want to hear. It ‘s the message that launches Amnesty International’s new campaign, in its Francophone version, to raise public awareness on the issue of torture. In addition to Iggy Pop, they also “tortured” the Dalai Lama (“A man who does not have a Rolex at 50 years of age is a failure”) and German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld (“The height of elegance is the Hawaiian shirt with flip-flops.”).

As the title promises, Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher’s Anarchism in America is a documentary survey of anarchism in the United States. The film presents an overview of the movement’s history, such as the Spanish Civil War, the 1917 Revolution, Emma Goldman, and the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti, and takes these as the points of departure for what were then (1983) contemporary observations from the outside looking in on Ronald Reagan’s America. Whether viewed as a time capsule or as an able introduction to the various forms of anarchism, the film makes for fascinating viewing and has held up well after 31 years.

What’s perfectly obvious is how much of a libertarian or individualistic route the American strain of anarchism takes—let’s call it “free market anarchism”—in stark contrast to European-style communal living experiments (such as squatters’ groups or farm co-ops). They’re just not quite the same school of thought, although if you were to draw a Venn diagram of what they do have in common, it would be significant but also… probably equally incompatible for the things which they lack in simpatico. Does anyone in Anarchism in America have any hopes for a revolution? Seemingly not in their lifetimes. (Many of them were right, of course. I’ve read that the filmmakers are planning a sequel, so I’d suspect that post-Occupy, post-Piketty, there would be more positive prognostications to be found along those lines today.)

Emma Goldman will not attend your revolution if she can’t dance….

The film also offers anarchist or anarchist-leaning thinkers uninterrupted camera time to make their points. Like Murray Bookchin, who says this:

I had entered the communist children’s movement, an organization called the Young Pioneers of America, in 1930 in New York City; I was only nine years of age. And I’d gone through the entire ’30s as a—Stalinist—initially, and then increasingly as someone who was more and more sympathetic to Trotskyism. And by 1939, after having seen Hitler rise to power, the Austrian workers’ revolt of 1934 (an almost completely forgotten episode in labor history), the Spanish revolution, by which I mean the so-called Spanish civil war—I finally became utterly disillusioned with Stalinism, and drifted increasingly toward Trotskyism. And by 1945, I, finally, also became disillusioned with Trotskyism; and I would say, now, increasingly with Marxism and Leninism.

And I began to try to explore what were movements and ideologies, if you like, that really were liberatory, that really freed people of this hierarchical mentality, of this authoritarian outlook, of this complete assimilation by the work ethic. And I now began to turn, very consciously, toward anarchist views, because anarchism posed a question, not simply of a struggle between classes based upon economic exploitation—anarchism really was posing a much broader historical question that even goes beyond our industrial civilization—not just classes, but hierarchy—hierarchy as it exists in the family, hierarchy as it exists in the school, hierarchy as it exists in sexual relationships, hierarchy as it exists between ethnic groups. Not only class divisions, based upon economic exploitation. And it was concerned not only with economic exploitation, it was concerned with domination, domination which may not even have any economic meaning at all: the domination of women by men in which women are not economically exploited; the domination of ordinary people by bureaucrats, in which you may even have welfare, so-called socialist type of state; domination as it exists today in China, even when you’re supposed to have a classless society; domination even as it exists in Russia, where you are supposed to have a classless society, you see.

So these are the things I noted in anarchism, and increasingly I came to the conclusion that if we were to avoid—or if we are to avoid—the mistakes in over one hundred years of proletarian socialism, if we are to really achieve a liberatory movement, not simply in terms of economic questions but in terms of every aspect of life, we would have to turn to anarchism because it alone posed the problem, not merely of class domination but hierarchical domination, and it alone posed the question, not simply of economic exploitation, but exploitation in every sphere of life. And it was that growing awareness, that we had to go beyond classism into hierarchy, and beyond exploitation into domination, that led me into anarchism, and to a commitment to an anarchist outlook.

Worth noting that Bookchin left anarchism behind, too, due to what he saw as the antisocial element to American style anarchist thought.

There’s one particularly amazing piece of footage (among several included in the film) that I wanted to call to your attention. It’s the demonstration of how a policeman’s truncheon fares against various food items such as an egg, squash, and an eggplant before moving on to a Yippie’s head. That clip comes from an “answer” film made by the Yippies in the aftermath of the Chicago riots that was played on television there due to the “equal-time” rule specifies that U.S. radio and television broadcast stations must provide an equivalent opportunity to any opposing political parties who request it. When Mayor Richard Daley got to tell the city’s side of the story in something called “What Trees Did They Plant?” the Yippies got to tell their side in an extremely whacked-out short film scripted by Paul Krassner. That starts at 30:50 but if you want to see the entire thing, click over to archive.org, they’ve got it. (The guy with the truncheon is Chicago-based lefty humorist and radio broadcaster Marshall Efron, who played one of the prisoners in George Lucas’ THX 1138. He was also the voice of “Smelly Smurf” and works as a voice actor in animated films to this day.)

Toward the end of Anarchism in America, Jello Biafra and Dead Kennedys are seen onstage performing “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now,” while in the interview segment a level-headed young Biafra suggests that anarchy, or some sort of revolution in the USA, is probably a long, long way off. If they do make the sequel, he’s one of the first people they ought to interview for it. I’d be curious if he still feels that way. I would suspect that he’s much more optimistic these days.

Radical activist and opportunistic prankster Abbie Hoffman’s infamous 1971 opus Steal This Book is part political manifesto and part handbook on getting things for free. The lists of goods and services he and his comrades thought should be automatically free to everyone, such as medical care (including birth control and abortions), higher education, and food, all considered unthinkably outrageous 43 years ago, have been subsumed by more recent movements as perfectly normal expectations in an affluent society.

The rhetoric doesn’t sound quite so jarring, either, except for the occasional bit of vintage slang. This Hoffman quote could easily be taken from a Russell Brand monologue:

Dig the spirit of the struggle. Don’t get hung up on a sacrifice trip. Revolution is not about suicide, it is about life. With your fingers probe the holiness of your body and see that it was meant to live. Your body is just one in a mass of cuddly humanity. Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines, and in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free. That doesn’t allow for cop-outs. Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power. We are not interested in the greening of Amerika except for the grass that will cover its grave.

Food insecurity is still a massive problem in the U.S. four decades later. Hoffman’s advice on finding, stealing, and scamming free food contains nothing that a poor college student, couponing single parent, “recession wife,” or unemployed person doesn’t already know: crash wedding receptions, bar mitzvahs, and conventions, ask for vegetables, bread, meat, and fish that are about to be thrown out at groceries, wholesalers, market stands, and restaurants (although I suspect most people would draw the line at asking for leavings at the local slaughterhouse), ask for “charitable” donations at canning factories, eat off other people’s plates at restaurants before tables are bussed, form a food co-op, and hustle from caterers. With ubiquitous security cameras in every chain grocery store, shoplifting food is much more of a challenge than it was back then. It may be easier to qualify for food stamp benefits now but food is astronomically more expensive.

The scams Hoffman outlines to get food from restaurants and food delivery people are clever but sometimes require props and costumes (a nun costume?). Of course, many of his ideas are obviously outdated (slugs for vending machines) or silly. He advises that you line your pockets with plastic bags before you load up on food to take home from buffets, especially fried chicken. However, it’s hard to imagine anyone today actually taking him at his trollish word and trying to pour coffee into a bag hidden in their pocket for later. Not when you can get free coffee at Half-Price Books or bank lobbies.

Hoffman included recipes for cheap food, including “Hedonists’ Delight,” which starts “Steal two lobsters,” and this one for granola, which would probably cost $100 in raw materials from Whole Foods:

Hog Farm Granola Breakfast (Road Hog Crispies)

½ cup millet

½ cup cracked wheat

½ cup buckwheat groats

½ cup wheat germ

½ cup sunflower seeds

¼ cup sesame seeds

2 tablespoons cornmeal

2 cups raw oats

1 cup rye flakes

1 cup dried fruits and/or nuts

3 tablespoons soy oil

1 cup honey

Boil the millet in a double boiler for ½ hour. Mix in a large bowl all the ingredients including the millet. The soy oil and honey should be heated in a saucepan over a low flame until bubbles form. Spread the cereal in a baking pan and cover with the honey syrup. Toast in oven until brown. Stir once or twice so that all the cereal will be toasted. Serve plain or with milk. Refrigerate portion not used in a covered container. Enough for ten to twenty people. Make lots and store for later meals. All these ingredients can be purchased at any health store in a variety of quantities. You can also get natural sugar if you need a sweetener. If bought and made in quantity, this fantastically healthy breakfast food will be cheaper than the brand name cellophane that passes for cereal.

It’s official. I’m a university professor - and at a public university where you can all come and study and work and devise the future of civilization for cheap. The official press release is below. The skinny? I’ve taken my first university post, as a professor of media studies at CUNY/Queens College, where I’ll be helping to build a first-of-its-kind media studies program. Instead of training people to become advertisers or to write the next useless phone app (and raise VC), I’m going to support people who want to see through the media, and use it to wage attacks on the status quo. This is media studies for Occupiers.

The undergraduate program is in full swing. The graduate program is accepting applications for Spring.

This is my answer to the emails I get every week from people asking where they can study media theory and activism. Come and get it.

Smart professors like Douglas Rushkoff attract smart students and smart students attract even more smart students. A few years back Doug had to be out of town and so I was the guest instructor for one of his NYU graduate studies classes. Smartest bunch of young people I’ve ever been in a room with and the reason they were all there was because of my old friend, that much was obvious.

If there was something like this when I was of college-going age, well I probably would have gone to college myself…

From the press release:

Rushkoff’s move to academia reflects his interest in social justice and the need to build media literacy in the rapidly evolving global media environment. “This is a rally for consciousness,” says Rushkoff. “The essential skill in a digital age is to understand the biases of the landscape – to be able to think critically and act purposefully with these tools – lest the tools and companies behind them use us instead.”

“I wish to foster a deeper awareness and more purposeful implementation of media, and this can be best accomplished at a mission-driven public institution such as Queens College,” says Rushkoff, a native of Queens who was inspired to join the school because of its rich legacy of social dialogue and engagement. “I want to teach a diverse range of students without putting them into lifelong debt. Besides, where better to work on media in the people’s interest than a public university?”

The school’s Media Studies Chair, Professor Richard Maxwell said “The college, with its unique community of students, creative artists, and scholars, has a tradition of cultivating a learning environment supportive of critical thinking and social consciousness. Rushkoff’s contributions to current thinking in technology, media, and society are at the forefront of the evolving study of media. He’s a great fit for our program and will complement our existing faculty in providing a transformative learning experience.”

Good move on the part of Queens College to hire Doug—I mean Professor Rushkoff—he’s a prestige name for the CUNY system in general. Starting in August, Rushkoff will be teaching courses in propaganda and media theory. The new Master of Arts in Media Studies program will be in full swing by Spring of 2015.

Below, a recent Rushkoff talk at the DLD conference earlier this month. I was going to post this anyway, and this announcement gave me the perfect excuse.

Ah, the French, you have to admire their idealism and their love for liberté, égalité, fraternité and all that. Now in a bid to fight sexism and inequality in schools, the education authority in Nantes, western France, is encouraging schoolboys to drop their trousers and wear a skirt to class today, at 27 lycées in the city.

Actor Laurence Olivier once remarked that he found the best way to become a character was to start with the shoes. Once he knew how the person might walk, he was able to choose the clothes that would help him best identify and understand the character more fully. This maybe some of the thinking behind the idea of “LIft the Skirt” or, as it is in French, “Ce que soulève la jupe” (literally: “‘What raises the skirt”), a campaign originally devised by pupils themselves in a bid to stop sexism, which has been sanctioned by the city’s education chiefs, and by association France’s Ministry of Education.

For those boys who would rather not bare a leg, they can show their support for the campaign by wearing a sticker saying: “I am fighting against sexism, are you?”

According to Elisabeth Costagliola, head of the organization PEEP, the campaign is supported by the pupils’ parents, saying there has been no negative reaction when the event was held last year.

“On the contrary, it was really positive with students saying that even some male teachers were prepared to come to school in a skirt,” Costagliola said.

However, there has been some backlash further afield from conservative politicians, including Olivier Vial, president of the conservative UNI party, who said:

“We’ll do any old nonsense in the name of equality. This move is inspired by the Day of the Skirt, whose original aim was to allow women to express their femininity in environments where it was often difficult. But this is just denying feminine and masculine identity,” Vial said.

“Ce que soulève la jupe” is an interesting idea, but as a Scot, from a country where men have worn plaid skirts, or kilts, for centuries (and even “women’s tights” [stockings] in the trenches during World War One—to counteract poisonous gas), sexism and inequality are still problems, which are unlikely to be solved by a one-day skirt-wearing event, though, I guess one can hope.

Do you like terrible art? Terrible art made by war criminals? And paraphernalia thereof?!?

Well, you’re in luck! An anonymous prankster at Society6 has been hawking prints, canvases, tote bags, throw pillows and wall clocks featuring the creepily naïve paintings of George W. Bush! You have your choice of Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin, Hamid Karzai, or if you’re feeling Freudian, daddy George Bush! All proceeds after production go to War Child International, a nonprofit describing itself as a family of independent humanitarian “organisations which work together to help children and young people affected by armed conflict.” How apropos!

The folks over at Animal NYC checked on the ethics/legal end of the copyright issues with their expert, Greg Allen, who described the stunt as, “kind of a dick move, supposedly by someone without the guts to come forward and claim their bad boy gesture.” He’s of the opinion that the merch is “purely a slow-off-the-line publicity stunt by Society6, which is the merchandising subsidiary of online content mill Demand Media. And it’s a dick move whenever a corporation rips off the creative output of an artist, especially an emerging artist. Even if he happens to be a war criminal.”

I have no such qualms with this kind of “theft”! For all I care, you can go steal the garden gnomes off of George W. Bush’s lawn—assuming, of course, you could manage to not get shot in the process. You can say that you’re “liberating” them! At the same time, I’m sure Allen is right, and this is just a gesture from Society6—unless you really like owning ugly conversation pieces, you’re better off just donating your cash or time to antiwar groups or foreign aid. Remember folks, having ugly throw pillows doesn’t fight the power!